Experimenting With Absurdity and Uncanniness – All the Unseen Familiarities in the Urban Spaces

Abstract

Experimenting with absurdity and uncanniness -- all the unseen familiarities in the urban spaces is a practice-based research project that engages with the familiar yet strange feeling of living in the urban area and how I, as a digital illustrator, creatively respond to urban uncanniness through research design.

This research is carried out through a subjective action-reflection process to explore the way illustrated animations and experimental animation installation potentially communicate urban uncanniness in relation to everyday life. The research practice comprises a range of moving image-based approaches, it includes sketches, digital illustration, and drifting, all of which are informed by the guideline of Autoethnography, Heuristic inquiry and Walking Methodology. The creative outcome of this research project, The Uncanny City, is a projection installation comprising three looping animations. It aims to shape our experiences of daily life, as it presents a series of unpredictable social experiences.

This practice-oriented research project has been guided by the belief that experimenting with the uncanny may evoke curiosity about our world in strange ways. It helps us to rethink the world around us via a more imaginative lens. These contemplations can emotionally connect dwellers to the urban environments that make up our experiences of living in a city. The questions that initiated the project and activated experimentation with animation and drawing materials are formulated into the following propositions: (1) How might the experimental animation communicate the urban uncanniness through illustrated-animation design? (2) Can experimental animation potentially lead the audience to reconsider their perceptions of urban spaces?

This research project has contextually explored the notion of the uncanny as it relates to this research project from three different perspectives: psychological terminology, sociological themes, and aesthetic expressions. The contextual review of knowledge has shaped the researcher’s understanding of the uncanny and its relevance to the design-based choices that, as the researcher, I made through my practice-based investigations. In addition, this research explores three critical contexts that contributed to my thinking and making, including the visual metaphor of architecture, the storytelling strategies of experimental animation, and the video projection installation. These contexts involve different approaches that help to shape the notion of the uncanny and communicate it via animation into a more innovative and immersive sensory experience. By exploring artist-theorists who have engaged in challenging practices in these three contexts, this research has reached some creative conclusions. They focus on the potential of experimental animation and projection installations to create the meditative and empathic aspects of the uncanny. My review of the influential aesthetic expressions of the uncanny informed the vital decisions I made while I created The Uncanny City.

Experimenting with the uncanny helped the researcher to fundamentally understand and explore the researcher’s complex feelings of awe and unease about urban life, and it helps the audience to think differently about the city, the world and our lives. Through the uncanny perspectives of the cityscape in my work, I seek to inform my viewers further about the uncanny aspects of city life that we often overlook or are usually too pre-occupied to think about and help us see more clearly what is happening around us.